Glow
by Enosimania
Summary: Taking place roughly one year after the Opera, this story is an exercise on the theme of jealousy, specifically Graverobber's.


The lights dimmed to a soft blue haze in tune with the music, until then violet and violent respectively. The girl tilted her head back, eyes closed, hair slipping over her painted cheeks with no little amount of self-love. She particularly showed off her bird-like throat as part of this exercise, making it execute a sort of bend sinister of slenderness and desirability.

The young girl swallowed the spicy liquid that had played in her mouth, simultaneously opening her eyes and twirling her hair. The drowsy, downy, soft Shilo gave a practiced smile. "Another one?" she asked with an eager tone, tired eyes. Her companion grinned crookedly at the suggestion, 'But of course my dear; do let me kiss your hand. You look positively fresh tonight.', etcetera. "Your idea of foreplay is really intoxicating." she joked, smiling as if the sarcasm was a hallucination of his, batting her lashes prettily while he personally refilled her little glass cup.  
>"Well, you know me..." he grinned pathetically at his famous date. "Drink up, come on." A finger, choleric yellow and probably bought, wandering lasciviously to caress a vulnerably naked, sacrificed shoulder. "You know how I like to watch you swallow." he whispered. Shilo grinned around the glass' edge, a tentative bite playing there a moment.<p>

"Do me a favour?" the man asked after the promised throat-play.  
>"Oh again?" she complained falsely, flirtatiously.<br>"I'm out of Z." he cooed. "I know someone close-by, this should be enough..." her partner went on as he counted his money, handing them to his sulking coquette as he pleaded "Come on, it's right around the corner! I won't leave without you, don't worry..."  
>With an emphatic hop, the girl bounced off the stool onto her biting heels, into her warm furs - which had belonged to <em>his<em> mother – and then one last "You'll owe me." before taking the money gingerly, pout set for a purr at the sight of his promising, pleased, philistine face.  
>The street was damp, cold, refreshing if dirty, and seemingly eternally dark - which suited her anyway. Pursing her painted pout further, Shilo strutted through the street vermin, scalpel sluts and addicts; independence wasn't as empowering as being able to survive it, especially for someone who grew up as sheltered as she. The girl did as best as she could with the only bankable asset her father had left her (this isn't about the house), and she promoted her modest but inciting looks – inciting because they were unusual, unusually intact – with an apparel which accentuated her exquisite slenderness, her dramatic paleness matched with her dramatic public person. Her stint in the news made her attractive to those with a taste for the quaint, and bit by bit she collected enough money from enough boyfriends to buy her own clothes and makeup and then they provided the rest of everything. When it comes to romance one man is as good as the next, and one with money is preferred to one without...<br>She was now around the corner, the bar's light fading a few feet away in the night fog. It was a typically obscure and dirty part of the city; she wasn't posing for attention here, though involuntarily and narcissistically she draped her borrowed coat around her waist just a little tighter, a little higher over her long legs, like a starlet doing it just like Herr Direktor taught her to.

Shy Shilo approached one wavering Zed-head, her look haughty and concerned all at once. "Where can I find some Z around here?", her voice so cold it didn't feel her own.  
>A dead finger pointed her in the right direction.<br>Poised a few feet away, the unmistakable, unforgettable figure of the Graverobber finishing a deal with another living corpse made her shiver with fear and melancholy. A splinter in her heart didn't want him to recognise her - had she changed enough? - and another part wanted to stay undecided forever – or changed too little? - but her John of the moment was religious about his addictions, Z above all (he probably just liked the pretty glow more than he needed the substance).

"Hey. Just one vial please; no shot." the shy bird said, counting the money in front of the man, her face low beneath the inky hair.  
>"First one's free, lovely." he recited, the perfect businessman with an extra edge of eagerness for an elegant albeit invisible new face.<br>"Naw, this isn't for me... John G sent me for it...?"  
>"Sure thing." he nodded as his adroit finger picked a vial. "How's he doing?"<br>She shrugged, head down, gaze askew to the left.  
>"You sure I can't interest you in a hit on the side, love?" the peddler gambled, tilting his head from its height to offer a charming smile to the scared little miss, veiled flirt thrown in for a boost.<br>But little miss shook her head without a word, paid him, and with arachnid digits picked the offered vial, achingly careful not to touch his skin with hers. Like a frightened animal she now trembled on the established territory of another, the trap of a brief but shared history hidden in the carcass of the forest floor. As soon as the vial was in her warm wet palm her shoes clinked her departure, _tip tip trip _- hurry.

The sight of the girl's demure departure amused Graverobber enough to give him a chuckle, but he spared no more thought to the created web of mystery and let it die along with her presence in his alley, and he continued to attend to his regular customers.  
>On the other side of the wall small Shilo breathed the night air anew, feeling a new perfume to it, a new caress in the chill, her heart dancing in its selfish, silly relief - she had been that close to him, and he never knew it. He didn't recognise her. It was as if her<br>transformation had been established, complete, absolute she fooled herself. The leather of her stilettos no longer bit her skin, her skirt wasn't too short anymore, and with the glowing azure between her fingers she lifted her hands in the air, cat-walking in a dance step back to the bar as her lips parted in a soft but sincere smile, her eyes closing for a moment in genuine delight.  
>In the absence of his intimidating figure, the Graverobber didn't seem as fierce nor as gratuitously threatening, and their brief reunion was in retrospect a thrilling thing. One trembling hand extended, fingers tickling and scraping the rough wall while on her other side the lowered left hand held the little vial and used it to tickle her thigh as she kept floating and tripping back to the bar. The electric wave of music softened her arrival through the parting fog.<p>

"Not too hard, was it?" her business-suit beau asked as she plopped down in his lap, her hands hooking themselves robotically around his neck.  
>"Horrid place." Shilo declared, shaking her head overly emphatically but nevertheless sporting a smile for him, her short hair playing around her thin face. "Don't ever make me do that again."<br>He laughed, not so much listening to what she was saying as must as he enjoyed watching her say it. Taking advantage of his distraction, Shilo took the blue little vial and set it on his lips, her eyes half-mast, her mind elsewhere as she moved the glowing glass around his lips. "But you said you'd owe me something...?"  
>He didn't 'owe' her anything she thought of as particularly attractive, as she could tell from his selfish, libidinous grin as soon as she mentioned it. Her thoughts of a new set of earrings were abandoned then and there.<p>

"What you must have meant was, you owed _yourself_something for getting me to do it." said Shilo in-between gags from the effort of hooking her leg around his waist a half-hour  
>later, half-ready to leave, behind the bar, teetering on drunk - he dizzy with excitement, she dazed with apathy. His preference was that she not wear anything beneath her skirt. He was a would-be-Roissy gentilhomme.<br>As Shilo poised her unimpressed self long and tall against the wall and around her selfish admirer, said admirer put his hand in his pocked and took out something considerably small; it was only due to a phosphorescent flash that the girl could tell that the cold and hard little thing this time was the Zydrate vial, and he was inventively using it to titillate her.  
>Through his meaningless kisses and her formally aesthetic moans, Shilo came to realise that she did find that quite the erotic exercise, though through no merit of John's. She clamored in tandem with his exercise, her teeth occasionally shivering, her throat extended white. Had she had a fetish for paraphilia behind dirty, dingy places it would have been easier to explain, but this excitement had a stronger taint of the hidden, forbidden, subliminal experience, and something of the tragically lost.<br>Her own little thrusts exceeded his expectations in their enthusiasm the further she got into the thing (or rather, the further it got into her) and he almost lost both his Zydrate and his senses trying to satisfy this out-of-nowhere thirst. He tried to speak, but couldn't think of what to say; and what she wanted to say had no place to fall on his ears, especially given it didn't even involve him.  
>Shilo's dark lids concealed a growing image of another strange world where one touch - that one – was replaced with a pre-existing one, around her thighs and her waist and around the glass vial between her lips then further still, and it grew to life in her intoxicated mind, with her excited imagination and her hopeless, muted lips begging for a name and settling with an erratic moan, a hopeless whimper, a shapeless shiver of breath. Her begging face, so close to him, almost made dear John feel somehow sorry for the girl, as if she was experiencing some agony he wasn't privy to and couldn't sate if he wanted.<br>The thought or hope that some impossible way _his_touch somehow still lingered on the vial, that he was ineffably part of what she was doing (by now John, poor him, was completely out of the picture), that he was sharing it with her though some magical, desperately needed fold in time drove her to distraction more than the by now warm glowing glass did, shivering against her teased, tensed little self.  
>Almost unable to suppress a feline scream Shilo turned her head against the wall, pressed her lips against her raised shoulder and finished her thrill against her silent, forgotten but satisfied partner.<br>Dazed and a bit ashamed, she opened her eyes to the sight of a ghost, at once cadaveric and prophetically angelic, leaning heavily against the same cold wall as she.  
>Graverobber was slowly shaking his head, dubiously amused or dissatisfied.<br>"Oh" her lips silently mouthed as she instantly moved to lower her skirt, somehow demure all over again, slipping into the image as she slipped her legs back down and  
>smoothed the skirt over them.<br>John managed to be more embarrassed than she was.  
>"Graves, shit man don't... don't do this again without an appointment, alright?" John laughed, wiping his hand on his fancy trousers and slipping the vial neatly in his pocket, being careful to pick someone up from there as well.<br>"I'll keep that in mind." the dealer chuckled, examining his faithful client. "So I see you're having a nice night." He looked at the girl again over John's shoulder, the dangerous darkness in his reproaching, tired, pained eyes making her blush with shame, but John giggled in his typical effeminate style. "How's er..." the dealer struggled, "Alice? Right?" John's wife. John's turn to blush as he finally slipped the until-then concealed wedding band on his finger.  
>"She's fine." he nodded loosely.<br>"Now that I found you though - you sent this pretty doll earlier, right? - you should know, as I'm certain you already do, I'm not your mother or some charity. So, you gonna pay for that Z you've already enjoyed so much?" and his eyes bolted back to Shilo, who by now was confused shifting to outraged.  
>"I don't understand," John gently started, "didn't she give you the money?"<br>Graverobber shook his head with an innocence that somehow managed to look sinister. "All she gave me were filthy looks; said you'd have it for me later. It's late enough, John, and after the fun you've had with it," he laughed bitterly, "I'm not taking it back. So come on, you know the fee."  
>"No, but I gave her money to pay for it..."<br>By now Shilo was already contemplating running off, but she masochistically stayed. As weird as John's fetishes were, as stingy he was at being cheated, nicked, or stolen from. He thought himself too generous to deserve such treatment. Shilo could almost see the blood reaching the tips of his ears.  
>"I... I don't know, man. Maybe I drank too much, eh?" he lamely joked as he paid Graverobber again, full of shame.<br>"It's not..." Shilo chimed in, taking advantage of a pause in the two men's conversation. Her penchant for being the perfectly quiet little mouse had never quite left her, but John interrupted her immediately.  
>"Later." he said.<br>Grim, despicable and pleased, the Graverobber tipped a non-existent hat with the money and wished the two "kids" a "fun night" before sauntering off to whatever black hole he'd crept out of.

"I swear I gave it to him!" Shilo pleaded with the exaggeration of despair. "Really I did!"  
>"That man's never lied to me since I've known him; you think I'd still buy Z from him if he played around with this stuff?"<br>"He's a corpse mutilating drug dealer in a filthy alley!" a revolted Shilo squeaked at John as he started walking away, waving his hand dismissively. "He hangs out around trash and junkies and lives on the street; that's the kind of man you trust? More than me?"  
>"Yes, he's the kind of man I trust." John echoed, looking down as he raised his hand for a taxi. "Give me mother's coat back."<br>"What...?"  
>"You heard me; the coat." still not looking into her face.<p>

With the fur on his lap like an oversized stray cat, the cab drove John away. In its dusty wake, Shilo stood tall and confused, and full of hate. As if struck by an afterthought she turned on her sharp screeching heels, her eyes hunting after that lying culprit; after he  
>recognised her, as she was sure he had, it had only taken him a couple of minutes to compromise her. In a dirty damp corner, he loomed like a stone grotesque with a frown, which is how she eventually found him.<br>At a loss for words, the girl lifted her pink palms at him questioningly, her dark-red mouth agape, her white nostrils flaring.

"What's your deal?" she eventually shrieked at him.  
>"You're very welcome, love." Graverobber flamboyantly replied. "You didn't want to have that lame and limpid thing do stuff like that to you any more, admit it." He started to grin the nearer she got to him, almost charmingly but still subliminally menacing, as if he had fangs that had yet to show.<br>"That's none of your business!"  
>"Speaking of business..." he perked, bouncing away from the wall he'd been leaning against, hands in his pockets as if he was casually looking for his card (black paper, white letters, knife-sharp edge?) while he was shamelessly looking for her eyes behind the heavy lashes and tears of frustration. "You're, what, hooking yourself now?"<br>"Oh fuck you."  
>"Sure, what's your usual charge?" the man darkly drawled.<br>"Nothing you could afford."  
>"<em>Ouch<em>... Hey, come on back!"  
>She walked away; he walked after her.<br>"It's hard to stay; you stink like a corpse." Shilo bit back, her voice once more cold and composed while her face, kept blissfully hidden, was full of shame and fear, and a few lonely tears.  
>"Didn't bother you before."<br>"You weren't asking for a fuck then."  
>To her surprise and disappointment, he didn't raise his brows or even purse his mouth at her novel language; how terrible it is to not be able to read people while knowing yourself, despite all efforts, still easily readable like a child.<br>"You weren't offering then..."  
>"Yeah, I'm still not."<br>"Even if you have to make a living?"  
>"You know, that's very true!" she quipped, suddenly stopping to point at him accusatorily. "What, like... desecrating the dead is any better than my just... accepting stuff from guys?"<br>"So you _are_hooking."  
>"No. Why am I <em>even<em>struggling to explain my situation to you…? What are you after?"  
>"Maybe I've just got this older-brother thing going for you." he shrugged, grinning brightly.<br>"Oh please..." Shilo chuckled, tilting her head dramatically, incredulously.  
>"What, you'd rather call me 'daddy'?"<br>"You're sick..." she grimaced.  
>"I didn't hear a 'no'." Graverobber played on, obviously amused with himself.<br>"Go away and paint your nails or something... Scourge."  
>By now they were both walking faster than before, Shilo on the verge of running, the dealer on the edge of chasing her.<br>"I said..." he grabbed her arm and pulled her back, pinning her against the nearest wall and she could hardly hear what he had to say after that, eyes cast sedately down and mind wandering away. "I didn't hear a 'no'." Graverobber repeated with predatory calm and an amusement he wasn't shy about rubbing in, together with his rough fingers tripping up her inner thigh. "Say 'no'…"

"Let me go." Shilo whispered, her breathing too shallow to afford her any volume.  
>"No...?" he dragged the word out, intentionally ambiguous and mocking. "What, you'd rather be pinning <em>me<em>?"  
>She laughed nervously.<br>"What happened to you?" Graverobber asked, sincere concern in his low voice this time. "It's not so bad… I feel like an actress sometime and – some of the guys I go out with, and that's all it is, _really_, it's… some of them are important, and could get me a really nice job one day." She still wasn't looking up at his uncomfortably close face to see the confused concern he wanted to show her. "I don't want to end up living on the streets."  
>"Like me?" he smirked bitterly.<br>"Yeah. Now let me go."  
>The girl could hardly finish her flat sentence before she took in a sharp breath between her gritted teeth. Graverobber's fingers had gone back with added pressure on her thigh, his nails digging into her flesh with overt sadism. She gave a small shriek when she felt them reach their intended warm target, and stop. A blush rose to burn her face and a nail that seemed cruelly long and sharp dug into her blooming tiny ache.<br>Something about it being him that held and touched her made Shilo slip back into her original, nearly abandoned self, the innocent and lost and openly shy girl that forgot herself when the man leaned in as if to kiss her breathless lips. His sharp titillation drove all thought from her mind, leaving only feelings of pain and frustration and she moaned meekly as his black lips grazed her cherry-red ones, both dry and hot and intentionally or not teasing each other.

Between her legs his finger moved at an increasing rhythm and the girl tried half-heartedly to squirm away, to push him off, to turn her head but his mouth kept following hers and his grip grew more aggressive. Her moans had taken on a pleading quality, and despite his outright anger at Shilo turning herself into what was basically a high-class call girl – for others' benefit instead of _his_, though he arrogantly tried to hide that thought – Graverobber had to inwardly struggle to ignore how she turned his punishment against himself through his own frustrations. The supposedly sacred part of women had long since been that sacred of a mystery for him, but the pained pleasure in her voice and how she tried to conceal it, her downcast gaze that teased him with its stubborn shyness, her helpless, hopeless, weak struggles almost made him feel like he had innocent little Shilo back, rising through her throat and in her hot blood, filling him with tempting tenderness.

"Louder." he breathed against her neck, his voice heavy for one lost moment before he lifted his head to allow her to look up if she wanted. "Why won't you moan for me louder, like you did back there?" She _did_ look up, more due to surprise and panic.  
>"How did you k…" but Shilo stopped herself when she realized that he can't have guessed she <em>did<em>moan for him when she was with John; but he obviously could guess that now. And Graverobber's brow rose cockily as he did.  
>"Knooow…? Come on, you can tell me." he chuckled and leaned in to whisper against her cold ear. "Who did you whimper for with your little voice, hm? Who were you thinking about?" And almost timidly he slipped a slow finger inside her, pressing and almost pulling her towards him with it and she wanted to scream. "Was it me?" the man asked with mockingly fake surprise while she was mute with shame and anger. With his voice lower as he began to <em>lose<em>the struggle and his hold over her effect on him, he repeated the question again and again until Shilo cried a weak "Yes" against his shoulder, moans breaking off her newly-found voice that sounded like genuine sobs but were only dry cries of frustration.  
>"I…" Shilo started as next to her cheek Graverobber's face took on some of the pain he registered from her, and she couldn't finish because she didn't know how - I love you; I'm yours; I want you; I'm dying…?<br>"I think I've had enough." he finished for her, at once pulling his calloused fingers out and putting on a disenchanted face as he moved away and left the girl against the wall on the verge of tears, her legs weak, her narrow chest heaving.

"When did you turn into something so disgusting, kid?" and her heart sank at his apathy. "Not everyone lost their parents, you know. And yeah, there's worse than what you're doing – like what _I_'m doing, as you oh so generously pointed out - but turning yourself into a slut for any dick with a dollar attached to it… I thought it was below you." he joked, cruelly at that, and his smirk showed it. "But I guess I was wrong."  
>Graverobber shrugged at her simply, turned around seemingly without a care and started walking off, finally spinning to look at her once more as he shouted "Let me know when you start stripping for Z or something. We can even make arrangements, for all time's sake?" and he slipped his finger between his lips, taking a quick suck of it before finally turning away and leaving her alone and ashamed.<p> 


End file.
